“PowerPoint is evil” author to monitor stimulus spending

The man who says that "PowerPoint is evil" is heading for the PowerPoint …

Government and industry bureaucrats addicted to spewing out mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations, be very afraid; Edward Tufte is coming to Washington, DC. The Obama administration has appointed Tufte to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, which will suggest ways that the $787 billion stimulus program's watchdog accountability board can do its job.

"I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service," Tufte explained on his website on Sunday. "And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do."

We're not so sure about that. Edward Tufte is a leading critic of and writer about graphic presentations. He's also a champion of clarity in writing and public speaking. Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University, much of his life has been dedicated to thinking out loud about what works and doesn't work when it comes to statistical charts, maps, and tables. His most famous book is his 1982 opus The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which coined the term "chartjunk."

"Like weeds," Tufte explained, "many varieties of chartjunk flourish." He identified three: "unintentional optical art"—bar and circle charts full of distracting moiré patterns; "the dreaded grid"—thick matrices of vertical/horizontal lines that make it harder to follow data; and "The Duck"—those goofy three dimensional graphic objects that you often see superimposed over maps and tables. They reminded him of various roadside stores built in the literal form of ducks.

"No information, no sense of discovery, no wonder, no substance is generated by chartjunk," Tufte warned. But those words were written two years before the invention of PowerPoint, which Tufte went after with particular gusto—perhaps most famously in his 2003 Wired essay, "PowerPoint Is Evil."

One damn slide after another

"Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't," Tufte's screed began. "Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall."

In "PowerPoint is Evil," Tufte argued that this particular product makes it easier for the presenter to get through his or her talk, but harder for the audience to understand it. Those endless cascading lines of text pretty much turn any lecture into a sales pitch, he complained. And since each panel can only hold a relatively small amount of verbiage, the speaker must deluge the audience with "one damn slide after another" full of bulleted lines.

While the person at the lectern may feel more confident with a big PowerPoint screen at his or her side, the audience is distracted from the actual message—overwhelmed and invariably bored.

Even worse, Tufte noted, PowerPoint enables presenters to evaluate their talks based on slide format rather than content. "Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content," he warned. "If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant."

Title eviscerated

But in later writing, Tufte took his campaign against PowerPoint beyond concerns about its impact on the quality of public speaking. His essay "PowerPoint does rocket science" offered a devastating critique of the presentation slides used to assess the space worthiness of the doomed 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle, after engineers noticed following takeoff that foam debris from a bipod ramp had struck its wing.

Tufte observed that a key slide title offered a reassuring assessment of the condition of the ship, while subsequent bullet points undermined the lead message. "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism of Tile Penetration," the title declared. But the last bullet noted that "flight condition is significantly outside of test database . . . Volume of ramp is 1920 cu[bic] in[ches] vs 3 cu in for test."

In other words, Tufte explained, the final bullet warned that the debris hitting the Columbia was 1920 divided by three, or 640 times bigger than data used in shuttle model tests. "'The correct headline should be 'Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models'," he contended. "This is a powerful conclusion, indicating that pre-launch safety standards no longer hold."

The slide title had been "eviscerated" by the lower-level bullets, yet the overall message of the presentation was one of reassurance. Two weeks after lift-off, the Columbia incinerated during re-entry. But presentations such as this, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board later concluded, allowed NASA management to create documents that highlighted what they already believed, while leaving conflicting evidence at the bottom of a pile of bullet points.

From this and other incidents Tufte argues that while PowerPoint is useful for showing pictures and videos, it's no substitute for a carefully written report that grapples with evidence in full paragraphs rather than abbreviated lines.

Now Tufte will be advising the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, tasked to "promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information."

Those last seven words sound like Tufte's bailiwick. "Maybe I'll learn something," he added in his post on his new job. "The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary." Maybe the people he advises will learn something too.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.